Mining in a new vein

By Clive Hamilton

If Gina Rinehart succeeds in getting a controlling interest in Fairfax Media, the only competition to the Murdoch stable of newspapers in Australia, the nation's political landscape will be changed.

Although she is famously shy of publicity, enough has emerged to make it clear that Rinehart has political views on the far right of the spectrum. Those close to her have reported that she would like to use her wealth to gain political influence.

Digital Image: Judy Green.

Last year Rinehart was named by Forbes magazine as Australia's richest person. She is reported to hold more than $20 billion in assets. Citigroup estimates she is on track to become the richest person in the world.

Rinehart inherited more than father Lang Hancock's mining company; she took on his politics, too. Hancock was described by one journalist as "a swashbuckling right-winger who believed people and governments should bow to his will". On workers' rights, WA secession and special deals for mining, Gina is her father's daughter. John Singleton, who has been close to both, said ''a conversation with Gina was a conversation with Lang. They both had the same fanaticism.''

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Hancock was close to the authoritarian Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whom even Liberal Party MPs accused of running a police state. Bjelke-Petersen gave the eulogy at Hancock's funeral. In 1975, Hancock launched John Singleton's Workers Party, the forerunner of the new right in Australia. Gina was in attendance, soon after she had dropped out of the University of Sydney claiming the lecturers were communists.

Singleton, who owns the Sydney radio station that broadcasts right-wing ranters Alan Jones and Ray Hadley, has known Rinehart most of her life and is still close to her. In a recent Good Weekend profile of Rinehart, reporter Jane Cadzow quoted Singleton bragging about their influence:

"We have been able to overtly and covertly attack governments … Because we have people employed by us like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Ray Hadley who agree with her thinking about the deployment of our resources, we act in concert in this way."

Gina Rinehart absorbed her father's penchant for sweeping aside the cream-puff concerns of city-dwellers. Like him, she once advocated opening up new mines in Australia by using nuclear explosions. Hancock got the idea of using nukes to excavate harbours from Edward Teller, the fiercely anti-communist ''father of the H-bomb'', described as "a major architect of the Cold War". Hancock invited him to Australia in the mid-1970s.

Rinehart complains bitterly about "red and green tape" and has created a lobby group called Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision (ANDEV). Her economic vision includes turning the northern half of the continent into a special economic zone, a place where mining companies would enjoy tax breaks and be able to bring in guest workers from poor countries to work in the mines.

Through ANDEV Rinehart has gathered around her some seasoned political activists, including one-time adviser to Pauline Hanson, John McRobert. According to the business press, ANDEV is "like a who's who of ultra-conservative Australian business".

Hugh Morgan is prominent in ANDEV. Morgan used to run Western Mining Corporation, but his enduring legacy is a series of right-wing groups he established or supported, including the H.R. Nicholls Society, which is dedicated to attacking trade unionism and expanding the power of employers.

Morgan has been close to right-wing Melbourne think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, which has a long association with the mining industry. The IPA is secretive about its funding but it would be a reasonable suspicion that its rapid expansion during the past two years has been financed by Gina Rinehart.

Morgan was the force behind the foundation of Australia's leading climate science sceptic organisation, the Lavoisier Group. Hatred of environmentalism runs deep in the culture of the Australian mining industry, and Rinehart channels her father on that score. She is now putting her wealth into the climate change sceptics' movement. She is enamoured of Ian Plimer, the geologist whose anti-climate science tracts have been systematically debunked by leading scientists.

Last year she helped fund the Australian tour of Lord Christopher Monckton, who argues that climate science is a communist conspiracy to establish centralised world government in Europe. Monckton is a fantasist whose repeated claim to be a member of the House of Lords prompted the sitting Lords to write a public letter demanding that he "cease and desist". He also claims to have won the Nobel prize. He is better known in this country for putting a swastika next to a photo of Ross Garnaut. None of this dents Monckton's credibility in Rinehart's eyes. So she invited him to give the Lang Hancock Memorial Lecture in Perth last year.

Rinehart has let it be known that she is worried about Australia's future, and wants to use her wealth to change it. Last year she bought a big chunk of Channel Ten, enough to gain a seat on the board. She is said to have used her influence to get Andrew Bolt his own program, The Bolt Report. Bolt is Australia's most obsessive climate science sceptic, and ended up in court for deriding Aboriginal people whose skin was not as dark as he thought it should be.

If Rinehart's position on the Channel Ten board is enough to secure Bolt a slot on the channel, we can fully expect her to use a seat on the Fairfax board to try to exert editorial pressure. Will readers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald soon have to endure regular opinion pieces from climate sceptics like Monckton and Plimer, and various others still stuck in the politics of the Cold War?

Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He stood as a candidate for the Greens in a byelection in the federal seat of Higgins in 2009.